unmarked graves on victory land
by sinkingsidewalks
Summary: A head wound and years of trauma. Post-ep for 6x22 "Veritas"


a/n I haven't written Castle in an age but I've been on a nostalgia rewatch and this episode just struck me in a way it didn't years ago. Anyway, if anyone reads this at all I hope you enjoy it, let me know? I'm around on tumblr too where I'm also sinkingsidewalks  
Also I wrote this instead of studying for a midterm so with me luck tomorrow, I'm gonna need it!

* * *

It's done.

Bracken was in cuffs, sitting in the interrogation room – her interrogation room – his smug smile no longer quite so smug. He hadn't said a word except to demand his lawyer.

Gates took one look at her, watching him through the glass, unable to keep herself from leaning weight against Castle's side, and told them both to go home.

Kate's done her part. She trusts her team to wrap it up, to knot the bow and sign the tag.

The loft's empty when Castle pushes open the door, his other hand trailing behind him, holding hers. It's a rarity these days but she appreciates the quiet, the chance to breathe. Their family will come later, to break her from her reverie, remind her of their life but for now she just wants to lick her wounds in private.

There's still blood in her hair. And whiskey.

Splashing water on her face in the precinct bathrooms did nothing to wash off the grit of the last few days so she heads straight for the shower.

She strips out of her coat and blouse and slacks, leaves it all in a heap on the tile floor. Steam piles up in the encased glass of the shower, sweeping up towards the ceiling in waves.

She shivers, belatedly realizing she's cold and pulls the glass door of the shower open to step into the spray. It's too hot. Even hotter against her goose-bump covered skin. But she doesn't feel it. It's hard to feel anything.

Except ghosts. Bracken's hand on her face, a gentle caress, more violating than the bullet he had put through her chest years ago. Whiskey spilling down her throat, both inside and out, soaking her skin, her shirt, and burning its way to her stomach. Her own gun, pressed against her temple, finger on the trigger. The shot's still ringing around her skull.

Even when it was her own hand alone pulling the trigger, each shot felt unnecessarily loud. The rounds she put into each man's chest – center mass, her forearm tensed to take the recoil, not a breath between each pull of the trigger – were both instinctual and full of rage. Each was personal, revenge for what they did to her, and a practical necessity. She's always felt something for the people she's killed before.

"Kate," Castle says, rounding the corner of the bathroom door, relieved and out of breath, like he hadn't only stepped into his office to call Alexis and reassure her that everything was all right, like things are still going wrong at every turn. His gaze drops, scans over her body, over the bruises that must be forming on her ribs, where Bracken's men grabbed her.

She pushes the shower door open, leaves her palm print on the glass and lets out a waft of steam. "Come here." Her voice barely makes it out of her throat but it drags his eyes back up to hers and he understands.

She lets cold air in as he strips, his movements methodical, like he hardly even notices he's doing it, slipping shirt buttons free and tugging his belt loose, his gaze still caught with hers, scrambling for some kind of understanding.

Not that she can give any to him.

His socks off, clothes in a pile beside hers, to be dealt with at a later that she can't comprehend, he reaches for her and that she can supply. She weaves her fingers through his, squeezes for a moment, tight enough to turn both their skin white, to feel his pulse in his palm, then releases, for him to glide his touch up her forearm. She brings him closer with her body.

He flinches against the scalding spray, a muttering of, "Jesus," under his breath and she remembers forgetting about the temperature.

There must be a kind of shock for this.

"Sorry," she whispers, reflexively, as he reaches past her to adjust the temperature down to reasonable and he shakes away her apology.

She tilts her head back into the now pleasantly warm spray, flinches when the water breaks through her hair and hits the healing wound on her scalp. Her hand raises to it before she notices, fingers caught in a snarl of her hair, in the crunch of dried blood.

"Let me," Castle says, her shampoo bottle already in his hand, and so she turns, no complaints to be had, to let the water beat down on her battered ribs, to run the last few days off her body and down the drain.

His touch is gentle but confident as he weaves soap into her hair, careful foremost of the goose egg on the back of her head from where the bottle hit. He untangles each knot formed in her hair carefully – the father of a daughter – without it pulling on her scalp. There's the grit of blood, as he moves soap towards the heart, to the point where bottle edge struck against her skull, which dissolves between the pressure of his thumb and forefinger.

"It's still closed," he says before she has the opportunity to ask aloud. "You'll avoid stitches."

She nods, barely, and closes her eyes. Disappears, like playing hide and go seek as a little girl, thinking that if she couldn't see herself, no one else could either. Some amount of time passes, then she feels his hand, free from her hair, on her shoulder turning her back to the water.

He guides her head under the spray with a hand on her neck. His hand, on her neck, not that of Bracken's man. She shudders anyway, leans her cheek into his palm, smooth and callous free, as cold soap runs out of her hair.

* * *

She lies back on his bed – their bed, they're still only two weeks away from getting married – letting her hair drip into the duvet and her bare calves hang over the end, bumping gently against the footboard.

"How are you feeling?" Castle asks, returning with the bag of peas from the freezer dedicated to injuries. He hands it over and she flinches as she tucks it against her ribs, cold over the thin worn cotton of one of his old shirts.

He lays next to her, head propped up on one elbow, body turned towards her. She reaches over, slips her hand under his shirt and lays her palm on his chest, his skin is still warm from the heat of the shower, it seeps up into her fingers which have already gone cold; his warmth and the steady beat of his heart, just barely tangible through the tips of her fingers.

"I don't know," she finally answers. She feels detached from herself, like someone pulled her out of her body, but she doesn't know if she's the ghost or the shell, her ribs don't hurt because they're not her ribs, her hand doesn't feel like her hand.

His heart does though, and the breath moving through his chest.

She thought she'd feel vindicated. The wrong righted. The villain behind bars. She thought the weight would lift off her shoulders, the hole would patch over her heart, that the music would swell and she'd be changed. But there's no glory.

Part of her feels nineteen, waking up in her childhood bedroom the morning after that ill-fated dinner, that ill-fated night, and realizing in the daylight that her mother is dead.

She sighs. Castle moves a stray hair out of her face. "You did a good thing today, Kate."

"She'd be proud," she whispers, mimicking his earlier words, watches him nod in the corner of her vision.

"I'm proud too."

Tears spring up, there as suddenly as they were not. She can taste the salt in the back of her throat, the heave of her chest suddenly heavier, almost more than she can bear, and they're slipping down the sides of her face.

He brings his hand up to hers on his chest, clutches at it through the fabric of his t-shirt. She twists her wrist and squeezes back.

Her breath stutters, uneven, but her voice stays steady. "I'm okay."

There's no glory.


End file.
